He was very matter-of-fact about the injury.
Roadside bomb. Shattered femur. A completely reconstructed knee. After
it healed, he walked with a cane.

That night, I watched
him through the kitchen window, slow and steady, every left step
anticipated a moment longer than the right. He headed for the corner of
Socorro and Cherry, and I washed the dishes, scrubbing with steel wool,
splashing soap onto the backwash. By the time he ambled past the house
on his way to the other end, my hands were pruned and inflamed from the
steaming water. As usual, his lips moved like he was talking to
himself, and I strained to pluck syllables from the miniscule tremors
of his mouth, aching to know them.

He hadn’t stopped
talking after, not altogether. The problem was how he now carved
careful statements from a large block of truth, giving me only
splinters and shavings. I understood that his walks were his alone,
that he didn’t have to strip his thoughts down to cold
objectivity during this regimented half-hour every evening the way he
explained his feelings to me in our bed.

“I feel
warm,” he said one night. “I feel that the air is hot in
here.”

I propped myself up on
one elbow and tried to lock his eyes still with mine. They were brown,
warm, deep, but in the darkness, I could hardly find them. Only the
whites, the outer edges. I said, “Don’t joke. I want you to
talk to me.”

He touched my face and
said, “I feel patient.”

I didn’t
understand what he meant, unless he was suggesting how I should feel.

But when he walked
alone, mumbling secrets to our empty street, passing under the wilting,
burning boughs of autumn, I believed he was writing poetry, overflowing
with the beautiful, jagged specificity of his pain. I wanted,
sometimes, to break the window and make him look, the words hanging
there on frozen, parted lips. I wanted him to say, “God, yes. I
feel like that.”

The call, months
earlier, had triggered an agglomeration of throat-crowding panic and
deep, heavy relief. Not dead – that was all that mattered. I
phoned everyone I knew, and I practically gloated, possessive of the
hard and fast fact of his survival as if I had saved him myself. I
didn’t worry that his leg would forever have shiny pink scarring
stretched across it like a poorly sewn knee patch. I didn’t worry
that he would struggle for months before he could walk with help. I
didn’t worry at all because the possibilities became finite,
limited to recovery, to rehabilitation.

He disappeared from my
view at the window, and I checked the oven clock. He’d be out
there another twenty minutes. I wiped my hands dry, then pressed them
to my chest. I wondered if it was possible for my hands to withstand
the kind of heat it would take to burn my body with them. The tops of
the feet, the eye lids – these areas were thinner, easier to
damage. I checked my sternum in the hall mirror by the laundry room. A
pink handprint, already fading.

His pants were hanging
on the rack next to the ironing board. They had been hanging there for
weeks, untouched. He’d lived in athletic shorts and sweats at
first, so it hadn’t been obvious, but when he put his slacks on
for church one morning, he stood in front of me and said,
“It’s shorter.”

He meant his leg. The
left had an inch of excess cuff. I’d been warned that the
smallest, strangest events were often the catalyst for mammoth
outpourings of everything from impassioned denial to primal rage, and I
braced myself for the outburst. But he only folded the hem up, and that
was it. I was the one who raided his side of the closet, grabbing
armfuls of his jeans and slacks, and promising to make the legs match
his. I hadn’t done it, though. I hadn’t touched a single
pair. He’d taken two from my pile and began wearing them again at
some point.

I looked at the pile
now. All I had to do was shorten the hems. But instead of pinning them
up and running them through the sewing machine, I found a stitch-puller
and laid the first pair over the ironing board. From the bottom, I
removed the inseam, opening the leg like a butterfly. I would make it
perfect. I would reconstruct the whole piece of material if I had to,
and I would change every detail of the garment to his specific
measurements, deliberate, so that the fact of the alteration was as
much a part of the piece as the button, the pockets, the label in the
back of the waist. Every last pair would bear the adjustments.

Melanie
Sweeney is an MFA student in fiction at New Mexico State University
where she also teaches and coordinates the Writers in the Schools
Program. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Sam Houston
State Review. She lives in Las Cruces, NM, with her husband and dog and
is currently at work on a novel and a memoir.

I'm interested
in the acute ways humans grieve and hurt, how sometimes the smaller
emotional burdens make us feel the most out of control. In this piece,
I hoped to articulate the experience of witnessing a loved one's
suffering, and of being helpless to fix it.